★Indie games by Greg Lobanov & friends★
Ahhh, it's been a while since I got write a proper musings newsletter. This one was sitting in my drafts for a long time... it mostly concerns a method to approach story writing, but it does touch on game design aspects which I'll get into at the end.
Writing a story with any amount of complexity quickly gets really hard. As you introduce more elements and characters, there's more and more opportunity for contradictions to emerge... different elements will have friction with each other, and those contradictions are what create plot holes, out-of-character moments, etc. I'm sure anyone with a published story can relate to "that one part" you were forced to leave in despite it not 100% making sense. But audiences are pretty smart, and when the story has contradictions, people will notice... and be affected... and even sometimes fixate on them.
As a creator, it's natural to want to remove the stain of imperfection by rearranging the story to hide its contradictions. It's even common, especially in more postmodern stuff, for characters to hand-wave contradictions away with a joke and a wink to the camera. But! I've found that when these problems emerge, they often point to something worth exploring. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that exploring these problems often gets to the questions that are most interesting for the audience. I think great stories are great when they confront difficult problems and do the work to properly explore them, and even manifest satisfying answers. Almost like a science researcher, a writer ultimately has to take a risk by collecting undiscovered data, and digest the results for their audience to appeciate. That effort and result is what makes stories satisfying, to me.
The way I've framed this so far could apply to basically any kind of story, but, I think it tends to come up often in games because their interactive elements introduce more elements and constraints that their stories have to address. To use a practical example from my own work, a contradiction like this lived at the heart of Chicory: A Colorful Tale: It's a game where the player can draw whatever they want anywhere they want. Is the player a three-year-old? A professional painter? A streamer drawing dicks on everything? We couldn't make any assumptions at all about what sort of artist our protagonist would be, so they're written to be someone who's never held a brush before and therefore could become anything. That's all well and good, but then every other character in the game must wonder... "why is THIS person the only one with the power to draw on everything?"
It's a really difficult question to answer! Step by step we chipped away at answering how a "nobody" would get this incredible power, how they'd hold onto it, and how every other character might deal with that. And in the process of addressing each of those big questions, we basically formed the entire plot of the game. It would have been a lot "easier" to hand-wave those questions away by (for example) calling the art-power a random gift from god and having the story be about some entirely different conflict. But by digging into its own weirdness, the story had a much more rich conversation with the gameplay and the player. I'm quite happy with the story of Chicory and how it unfolds... and what's neat to me is, I never would have started exploring that direction if the basic gameplay premise hadn't forced me into it initially.
One last observation from me... the ability to present a contradiction, and explore it, is something that written narrative is particularly well-suited for. Whereas game design is ultimately very weak at it. Games and game mechanics are built on hard, solid rules defined by computer programming and mathematical logic. A design can certainly be challenging, or unpredictable, but when designs break out of "logical" space, they quickly feel unfair, frustrating, or disrespectful to players... not to say those experiences aren't valuable, but they often fail to geniunely reach and communicate with players because when you engage people with game mechanics and numbers, their personal sense of justice becomes very sensitive. What I'm saying is that in the collaboration of design and writing, it's really important to understand which arena is the best space to explore each aspect of the experience you want to build. When a game's gameplay is fun and brain-tickling, while the story grapples with dark paradoxes of the heart... if you ask me, THAT'S the real good stuff!!!